My general rule of thumb is that unless you're a) paying for it and also b) those payments represent a significant source of revenue for the company offering it, it's never worth investing significant effort to rely on a third-party API.
Medium is the current poster child for this, but myriad examples before and since Google killed of Reader exist.
Free/Open Source Software & Services suffer different ailments, such as developer abandonment and discoverability. At least with F/OSS the source code is available so someone else can carry on.